Early Career Associates

Rachel Bryant Davies

Rachel’s research examines the reworking of classical mythology in tragedy and epic for new contexts and audiences, from opera to children’s games. She has focused in particular on the late antique religious adaptations of Greek Tragedy of Ezekiel’s Exagoge (GRBS, 2008) and Christus Patiens (forthcoming in JHS, 2017) and, more recently, on nineteenth-century British classical burlesques and toy theatres. She was a Doctoral Fellow of the Leverhulme-funded Cambridge Victorian Studies Group from 2007-2011 (supervisor: Professor Simon Goldhill), examining the manifold afterlives of the Trojan War myths in nineteenth-century Britain. Her resulting book, Imaginary Cities: Staging the Ruins of Troy and Carthage during the Nineteenth Century, is to be published in CUP’s ‘Classics after Antiquity’ series. Her latest project, ‘Classics at Play: Greco-Roman antiquity in British children’s culture, 1750-1914’ traces how knowledge of the ancient world was repackaged beyond formalised educational settings, with an emphasis on unravelling how toys, games and leisure entertainments (such as theatrical souvenirs and playscripts) interacted with more overtly pedagogical paraphernalia.

Małgorzata Budzowska

Małgorzata is an Assistant Professor at Classics Faculty, University of Lodz in Poland. She was awarded her PhD by the University of Lodz, Classics Faculty and MA by the Institute of Contemporary Culture (theatre and drama theory) at the same university. She is the author of two books: Phaedra – Ethics of Emotions in the tragedies of Euripides, Seneca and Racine (Peter Lang 2012) that considers intertextual correlations between three plays which adapted the myth of Phaedra in relation to the theory of unrestraint (akrasia) by Aristotle, and Sceniczne metamorfozy mitu. Teatr polski XXI wieku w perspektywie kulturowej (Stage Metamorphoses of Myth. Polish Theatre of the Twenty-First Century in the Cultural Perspective) (University of Lodz Press 2017) that analyses reception of ancient Greek myths in its contemporary stage adaptations. She also published, as co-editor, the two volumes: Ancient Myths in the Making of Culture (Peter Lang 2014) and Metamorphoses of Ancient Myths (Peter Lang 2017). Her co-authored forthcoming book Starożytny teatr i dramat w świetle pism scholiastów (Ancient Theatre and Drama in the Work of Scholiasts) (University of Lodz Press 2018) consists of translations and analyses of ancient commentaries (scholia) relating theatre practise in Greece and Rome. Her internship in the APGRD (Michaelmas 2014 – Hilary 2015) concerned the management of interdisciplinary research projects and is funded by the Foundation for Polish Science.

Marie-Louise Crawley

Marie-Louise is a choreographer, dancer and researcher. Her research interests include dance and museums, as well as areas of intersection between Classics and Dance Studies, such as ancient dance and the performance of epic through a practice-as-research lens. She is currently postdoctoral Research Assistant at C-DaRE (Centre for Dance Research) Coventry University, having completed her PhD, ‘What Remains? Dancing in the Archaeological Museum’ at C-DaRE in 2018. She has had a long-term and on-going association with the APGRD since her undergraduate and postgraduate study at Oxford (Classics and Modern Languages, 1998-2002; M.St. European Literature, 2002-3), and then throughout her professional performance career, both with the Théâtre du Soleil (2003-2009) and as an independent dancer and choreographer (2010-). She featured in the Bareface Greek film commissioned for the APGRD Medea: A Performance History e-book, and more recently, the practice-as-research component of her PhD thesis (a solo durational dance work for the Ashmolean Museum) was developed in part during a six-month artistic residency at the APGRD. Her chapter ‘Epic Bodies: Filtering the Past and Embodying the Present – A Performer’s Perspective’ is included in F. Macintosh, J. McConnell, C. Kenward and S. Harrison (eds.), Epic Performances from the Middles Ages into the Twenty-First Century.

Arabella Currie

Arabella Currie completed her doctorate, supervised by Fiona Macintosh, in 2017. She researched the history of Graeco-Celtic negotiations, tracking the difficult angles between Greek and Celt as found in the scholarly and artistic reconstruction of both traditions, from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. She was particularly interested in how these angles were interrogated in the work of the Irish playwright, J.M. Synge, a crucial and overlooked figure in the story of the Irish reception of Classics. Alongside academic research, she is interested in putting classical reception into practice, having translated and directed several Greek tragedies (including the 2014 Oxford Greek Play) and published a collection of poetry which draws substantially on the classical world (The Divers, Hurst Street Press, 2016).

Cécile Dudouyt

Cécile Dudouyt teaches French-English translation and Translation Studies at the University of Paris 13 (English Faculty, https://pleiade.univ-paris13.fr/profil/cecile-dudouyt/). Her research focuses on early-modern translation practices and the reception of Greek tragedies in France and in England from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. After a first research project on the reception of Sophoclean drama and its impact on early-modern tragedies and theories of the tragic (Sophoclean Revenge, Renaissance and Enlightement re-writings, 2009) she worked on the APGRD translation database, collecting French translations of ancient drama. Beyond comparisons between Antiquity and Modernity, and between English and French literature, her research explores how French and English receptions of ancient texts interact, combine, and contrast.

Stephe Harrop

Stephe Harrop's PhD (Royal Holloway, University of London) was a PaR project examining poetic text and the dancing body in translations of Greek tragedy. Stephe is currently Lecturer in Drama (Shakespeare and the Classics) at Liverpool Hope University, having previously taught at The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, Rose Bruford College of Theatre and Performance, and Goldsmiths College (University of London). Her major research areas are the re-performance of ancient tragedy and epic, the traditional arts in modern theatre-making, and contemporary storytelling practices. She co-edited Theorising Performance: Greek Drama, Cultural History and Critical Practice (Duckworth, 2010) and is currently co-authoring Greek Tragedy and the Contemporary Actor (Palgrave Macmillan). Other recent publications include ‘Speech, Silence and Epic Performance: Alice Oswald’s Memorial’ (New Voices in Classical Reception Studies, 2013), ‘Ercles’ Vein: Heracles as Bottom in Ted Hughes’ Alcestis’ (Classical Receptions Journal, 2014), ‘Grounded, Heracles and the Gorgon’s Gaze’ (Arion, 2015), and ‘Greek Tragedy, Agonistic Space, and Contemporary Performance’ (New Theatre Quarterly, 2018).

Eleftheria Ioannidou

Eleftheria Ioannidou, Lecturer in Drama at Birmingham University. She studied theatre in Athens and London and read for a doctorate at the University of Oxford working on the rewriting of Greek tragic texts from 1970s to the present (supervisor: Fiona Macintosh). From 2010-2012 she held a Humboldt Research Fellowship at the Freie Universität Berlin. She is co-editor of the volume Epidaurus Encounters: Greek Drama, Ancient Theatre and Modern Performance (Parodos Verlag Berlin 2011). Her revised thesis will be published by OUP in 2013. Her current research focuses on fascist appropriations of Greek tragedy in the inter-war period.

Lucy Jackson

Lucy Jackson is a Lecturer in Greek Language and Literature at Balliol College, Oxford. She studied at the universities of Exeter and Oxford, and completed a doctorate in March 2014 on the dramatic chorus in fourth-century Athens (to be published with OUP). Her current research project focuses on the ancient Reception of Old Comedy. During the past year she has acted as an academic consultant for the National Theatre’s production of Medea, the Oresteia at Shakespeare’s Globe, and theIliad at the British Museum and Almeida Theatre. Her research interests focus on ancient performance culture and in particular the chorus in the ancient and modern world.

Hallie Marshall

Hallie Marshall is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Theatre & Film at the University of British Columbia. Her PhD thesis, on the classical plays of Tony Harrison and the history of performance of classical drama in England, is currently being revised as a monograph. Recent publications include chapters in Ancient Greek Women in Film (Oxford University Press, 2013), No Laughing Matter, Studies in Athenian Comedy (Bristol Classical Press, 2012), and The Blackwell Companion to Sophocles (Blackwell Publishing, 2012).

Tom Sapsford

Tom is PhD candidate in the Classics Department at the University of Southern California. He is currently writing his thesis which considers the significance of the kinaidos/cinaedus in Greek, Roman, and Greco-Roman Egyptian contexts. Prior to pursuing the study of Classics, Tom was a professional dancer and choreographer working with institutions such as the Royal Ballet, the Royal Opera House, and the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. His academic interests more broadly are ancient and modern performance cultures, contemporary dance and the classical world, and the history of sexuality. He joined the APGRD as a visiting scholar from Michaelmas 2014 to Hilary 2015.

Helen Slaney

Helen’s primary research interest is the embodied phenomenology of classical reception. She currently holds a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship at St Hilda’s College, investigating first encounters with ancient material culture in the late eighteenth century. A particular area of interest is how the sense of touch was involved in generating ideas about the ancient world.

The monograph based on Helen's DPhil thesis, The Senecan Aesthetic: a performance history was published with OUP in 2015. Supported by the Randall McIver JRF, Helen went on to study the intersection of emotion and human movement in ancient dance. In 2013, Helen set up the TORCH network ‘Ancient Dance in Modern Dancers’, an interdisciplinary research project established in conjunction with the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology.

Henry Stead

Henry Stead is the Post-doctoral Research Associate on ‘Classics and Class in Britain 1789-1939’. His research interests include: the reception of classical poetry and drama in Britain, translation of ancient literature, cross-media poetry, and Romantic-era British culture. Henry also translates ancient poetry and plays — recent shows include: Attis (Catullus 63, 2013), Seneca’s Medea (Stephen Spender Prize, 2011), and Prometheus Chained (Sheffest, 2012). He is currently completing his first academic monograph on the reception of Catullus in the Romantic era, an expanded conversion of his PhD thesis, which he wrote at Open and Oxford Universities as the holder of the Michael Comber Studentship for Classical Reception.

Eleanor Swire

Eleanor Swire was awarded an MSt. in Classical Languages and Literature by the University of Oxford in 2015. During her MSt. she worked as an Archival Assistant at the APGRD, before subsequently completing a traineeship in the archives and special collections library of St. John’s College, Cambridge (2015-16). Her research interests focus primarily on the translation, expurgation and adaptation of classical texts in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, while her recent archival work includes a project to successfully catalogue the personal papers of the British writer, designer, and photographer Sir Cecil Beaton.

Marchella Ward

Chella is the Tinsley Outreach Fellow at Worcester College (Oxford). She recently completed her doctorate in Classics at Oxford, on blindness in the theatre (both ancient and modern), but had been a frequent visitor to the APGRD study room through her undergraduate degree in Classics and English and her MSt. in Classical Languages and Literature, both from the University of Oxford. She has a chapter on Ted Hughes' and Shakespeare's reworkings of the Pyramus and Thisbe myth from Ovid's Metamorphosesin the APGRD's 2018 volume Epic Performances from the middle ages into the twenty-first century, ed. F. Macintosh, J. McConnell, S. Harrison and C. Kenward (OUP 2018). She has also written on Milton's classical blindness, and on Senecan echoes in the in-yer-face plays of the 1990s. Chella was the APGRD's Archivist-Researcher 2017-18.

Rachael White

Rachael White completed her D.Phil, 'The Man on the Land: Classics in Colonial Australia', under the supervision of Professor Fiona Macintosh in 2017. She researched the reception of Greek and Latin literature in colonial Australia's literary and political culture, with a particular focus on the use of classical texts in laying claim to the Australian landscape. She completed her undergraduate degrees at the University of Adelaide, and an M.St in Greek and Latin Literature at Oxford in 2013. Her M.St thesis explored classical receptions in the works of three Australian poets, Les Murray, Peter Porter, and Judith Wright. She now works at the Archive as Associate Archivist.

Rosie Wyles

Rosie Wyles studied Classics as an undergraduate at Oxford and has been involved with the APGRD since 2004, when she was awarded the AHRC PhD studentship attached to the project on the reception of the tragic canon within antiquity. Her thesis, supervised by Professor Edith Hall and awarded 2007 (University of London), was on costume’s role in the ancient performance reception of Euripides’ Telephus, Heracles and Andromeda. She is now lecturer in Classics at the University of Kent. Her research interests include: Greek and Roman performance arts, costume, reception within antiquity and beyond, and gender.